For five years when my family fancied itself fancy—spanning the late '90s until I graduated from high school in the early aughts—we belonged to Green Acres Country Club in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. There was some deal on new memberships, and my entrance into this milieu, procured at a bargain price, exposed me to a host of tastes, smells, and traditions. It was here that I discovered Pinaud Clubman talcum powder, an aristocratic chalk that would greatly inform my sense of sophistication amid limited options.

Whiling away summer days on the golf course or slugging it out in sets of tennis on the Har-Tru courts necessitated some form of indulgence upon returning to the club house. I’d fix myself a freshly brewed iced tea and kind of hide in a corner with a book in the men’s bar lounge, where kids were technically prohibited. Wimbledon or some golf major would be on the TV, and one club regular would puff on his pipe filled with delicious-smelling Latakia.

Pinaud Clubman talcum powder

Pinaud Clubman

After I'd cooled down, I'd head back to the locker room to get ready for dinner. After a schvitz in the steam room and a shower, I’d dry off and wander over to the vanity, replete with toiletries—Q-tips, combs soaked in rip-tide blue Barbicide. As a fresh-faced young man—my blotchy cheeks all milk and blood—I gravitated toward using what was available on the counter to diversify my self-care regimen. I didn’t yet shave, but I could flaunt a bit of true grit. That’s why I was drawn to the green bottle, emblazoned with the caricature of the mustachioed Frenchman: Pinaud Clubman.

After millennia forming in the earth, this sacred chalk has an urgent purpose in the present: to freshen the back of the neck before a board meeting or date night. It’s a bit of yesteryear dude dust—preventing just that rogue layer of sweat from forming. It keeps the collar dry and emits (at least to me) an intoxicatingly virile perfume.

Best applied after drying off from a shower, the technique is simple. Hold the bottle at a 45-degree angle above your shoulder blades before giving the container two eighth-note squeezes. The powder will rise in a little cloud and fall evenly on your neck, at which point you can pat it down or rub it in evenly to avoid any clumping. (At the Uzbek barber shop I frequent on Wall Street, my regular guy shoots the powder directly into a badger-hair shaving brush and impastoes my neck in deft strokes to reduce irritation after a shave.)

French perfumer Edouard Pinaud debuted his men’s grooming products in 1810 at House of Ed Pinaud in Paris. By 1830 Pinaud opened his first store front in the City of Lights, and Napoleon, who had become a fan of the company's lilac vegetal product, named Pinaud "royal parfumer" in 1833. The brand garnered international attention by the early 20th century, and since the 1980s, American International Industries has owned the Clubman line.

In Ian Fleming’s In Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the author makes James Bond a fan of the Pinaud brand, if not of the powder itself, when the spy checks into his hotel: "When the [champagne] bottle, in its frosted silver bucket, came, [Bond] drank a quarter of it rather fast and then went into the bathroom and had an ice-cold shower and washed his hair with Pinaud Elixir, that prince among shampoos, to get the dust of the roads out of it."

Peter Ruck / Getty Images

Fleming and Bond knew what a New Jersey teenager had yet to discover: The Pinaud musk, especially in powder form, refines a man, makes him tuxedo-ready and prepared to take on an evening of danger and delight.

It should be noted that this soothing unguent is under some fire. Along with coffee and cell phones, it’s been listed on the IARC 2B category for the possibility that it could cause cancer. Though studies are scant, watchdogs have raised concern over the common appearance of asbestos ore amid underground talc deposits. Amped-up scrutiny of talc led to the thorough separation of industrial-grade talc from that intended for food or cosmetic products. Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has labeled talc as safe for use in table salt, and a 2015 Cosmetic Ingredient Review Expert Panel study deemed talc powder safe to use, allaying health concerns that have set the product back.

Which is all to say, I haven't been scared off. I'm still going to indulge from time to time. The ritual still holds magic. Like myrrh in a mass processional, Pinaud spouts out of its portion-control holes with ceremonial solemnity. There is also something grandfatherly about Pinaud Clubman that hearkens back to my own pa, a Jersey tomato distributor, whose scent filled his Cadillac or Mercedes as we drove down the shore. A World War II vet and high-school all-American football player, he embodied a masculine archetype epitomized by this old-school smell.

The author’s grandfather

Courtesy of Ross Kenneth Urken

"I don’t use powder myself, but I completely approve of anything you find in a men’s club locker room that’s been there since your grandfather joined," says David Coggins, author of the book Men and Style. "In general, the foundation of grooming has to do with rituals. It’s good to have them—they give you a sense of continuity even perspective. You’re like a Buddhist monk, who smells really good."

Some may bristle at the dustiness of this dying rite, but it's something I have grown to treasure. One secret Pinaud offers is the illusion of luxury, bottled as such, without the price. The powder contains in its olfactory essence the lifestyle of Green Acres Country Club—the boyhood idylls of leisure sports and my nose stuck in a book while working my way through an Arnold Palmer.

But like pixie dust, it allows the summoning of the sybaritic, the trappings of some past that has—from right behind us—performed some cruel disappearing act.

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